Considering the enormous expense and effort that went into obtaining those moon rocks, it's not surprising they were technically "loaned" rather than "given away" as you mistakenly assert.

The point is there needs to be a legal framework in place so such expenditures are protected. The only way to spur private space exploration is to make it possible to profit from it. Otherwise it's simply a huge waste of money - what benefit does humanity derive from, say, letting the hyper rich shoot themselves into orbit for a short while?

Extraterrestrial resource extraction could mean endless supplies of things like rare earth minerals needed for high tech manufacturing. You do like cheap computers and cell phones, don't you?

The point is there needs to be a legal framework in place so such expenditures are protected.

I suggest that for starters treating all space bodies as public domain is the best way to go.

Otherwise, how do you separate people with plans in motion to go there from those who are merely being 'patent trolls' by claiming something and doing nothing with it? Or claiming something with the specific purpose of making sure someone else can't make use of it?

Think of all the time (money) a company will need to spend to figure out the best place to set up a mine on an asteroid in order to extract enough material to make it worthwhile. Why would they go through those efforts when a competitor can just wait for them to do that, then setup a new mine right next to it? The competitor can then undercut the original company's profits immensely as they have no R&D expenses to pay.

That's what I see happening with the public domain option you speak of, and it is on

Well, stuff in space _is_ scarce, in the sense that it's not infinite, that is. Sure, there's _a lot_ of non-stellar mass in the solar system, but the parts of it that are easily accessible with current technology is really pretty limited. Luna, Apollo asteroids, and the occasional comet, mostly. And to make things even trickier, what happens when people start living out there permanently? That chunk of rock will be just as much 'their' property as any piece of terra firma.

Start with the simplest way to handle ownership claims and see where that goes: You have to go out and stick a flag on it to even have a shot at such a claim being legit. In person, or will a probe suffice? Define "probe"; don't want anyone spamming the surface of Mars with 1" radio cubes and claiming the entire planet as a result. For that reason, I'm inclined to limit ownership claims solely to putting boots on the ground. You own your unmanned probe and anything in produces using unowned resources (so automated factories are allowed), but the body as a whole is still up for grabs.

Of course, how much can you claim? The entire asteroid/cometplanet? Well that sucks. The EU founds a small colony on Mars just a few weeks ahead of the US and Chinese, so they get the whole pie? I guess you could make it a function of how many people you actually have there, but do they have to be there permanently?

And hey, who's going to enforce all this anyway? Considering the potential riches involved, nobody is going to accept a UN ruling that means that country A gets the piece of rock that country B just spent $10 billion putting a mining facility on because A sent a suicide volunteer on a one-way trip to put them on said rock before B.

I suspect that in the end, the 'border's will be decided in the traditional way. Namely, guys with guns moving them around until they conclude that getting a bigger piece of the pie for themselves would be more trouble than it's worth.

When you are mining an asteroid as it's passing by Earth, ownership is determined by who has the most/biggest guns in the immediate vicinity.

In other words, the same rules as we have on Earth. A government claims a land because they want it and they have the means to defend it against other claims. Said government then "sells" pieces of said land to its citizens.

In other words, the same rules as we have on Earth. A government claims a land because they want it and they have the means to defend it...

Sort of...but with a nasty twist. Whoever has control of large amounts of material in space and the ability to transport it back to earth will actually have the biggest guns. So if we let corporations loose in space without some viable means to prevent large chunks of rock hitting the Earth they will end up not just with more spending power than governments but with more military might than them too. I'm not sure this is a good environment for democracy to flourish.

Private property already barely exists on earth... Fat chance of that in space. As a previous poster said, it all boils down to the larger guns and that makes it a government-only game in space and on earth. If your government is nice, it can let you pretend that the property is yours (at a recurring cost of course) so long as it doesn't need it for its own ends.

There is precedent in the U.S. federal government's history of land grants to railroad corporations -- once the corporation owned the land, it had a strong incentive to increase the land's value by laying track. The situations are not quite parallel: in that case, the land rights only covered surface uses, not mineral rights; and of course, in the case of the Moon, the federal government has no land to grant. But while the general recognition of secured property rights would here take the place of grants from a previous governmental owner, the central premise still applies.

In the scenario envisioned here, the government would recognize claims and register titles, and claimants could then begin to grant, sell, and trade property deeds.

The question would be how to resolve governmental control, which government can grant which chunks of land to who, and what laws people on those plots need to follow.

Arguments about regulation aside... I think most of us can agree that private space countries that do not even have the pretense of a judicial system are a scary concept.... and not one that has historically gone very well.

I think if it's going to happen this way it won't happen at all. Everything you're doing there is extremely expensive anyway and having to defend it is going to make it so much more expensive that nobody will bother with it to begin with.

Either we will find better and more civilized ways to manage that or we will just sit here on this rock forever. And we will deserve it then, in my opinion.

Good point. I had forgotten. There are several treaties about space, and I believe the one that says "No nation can claim any part of the moon" was signed by the US.... Ahh, here it is. The Outer Space Treaty [wikipedia.org], signed initially in 1967 by US, UK and USSR and over 100 countries since then, is described in Wikipedia as follows. So the interesting question is whether a private party is under the same restrictions by dint of being a subsidiary entity to a nation. The language in the last paragraph cited co

A valid question, with an interesting non-answer. IIRC according to the Moon Treaties, no nation may lay claim to any part of the Moon. But there is no language in the treaty regarding private claims. It is not certain that there is any legal connection between a private entity and a nation, especially these days when a corporation may have branches in 100 countries. So at this time nobody can say whether a private claim on the Moon would be legally sound. (Which effectively means, "first come, first s

Nope - according to the Moon Treaties, no nation may lay claim to any part of the Moon. But there is no language, or precedent, applying to private entities. I.e., nobody knows. This is a huge area of concern for everyone involved in space development. One fairly obvious outcome, should this not be resolved soon, will be "first come, first served - who's going to stop me?" And shortly thereafter, declarations to the effect, "We hereby declare the area of Tycho Brache to be sovereign territory." And then the wars. Hopefully a legal structure will be agreed before we get that far - that's essentially what happened in the European colonial period, but over five centuries a large body of treaties, laws and legal precedents were worked out that should be useful as a prototype.

all of these — especially the efforts to mine resources in space — are hampered by the fact that existing treaties, like the Outer Space Treaty, seem to prohibit private ownership of space resources

That is one problem, but a somewhat bigger problem is that nobody has yet come up with a plan to mine moon rocks and return them to earth where the cost of the missions doesn't greatly exceed the value of the rocks.

That's why, unsurprisingly, even folks like Jain who claim [theweek.com] that "private companies can

If you need it, and the only way to get it is expensive launching, then you will either eat the cost or you will find a way to do it cheaper ("you" in this case meaning whomever needs it, or us in general).

Recycling won't get us any more material than we already had. Eventually that will not be enough.

The value of something is exactly what you're willing to pay for it. Saying that something is needed is just another way of saying that its value is greater than any potential cost. The idea that "the value doesn't matter" is nonsense. This entire thread is about nothing but value; whether you realize it or not, you're saying that the value of these materials is greater than the cost of going to space to mine them.

The plan Page/Schmidt had involved using the rocks to build things in orbit, not sending down the rocks. The idea being that creating the heavy infrastructure for space stations could be done without having to get it out of the gravity well. The price they're chasing is the price of launching rockets with giant chunks of space station attached, not the price of raw materials on Earth. Not to say that they're anywhere near capturing an asteroid and figuring out how to refine ores in space, but I hear they

Governments tend to prefer to pretend that natural rights don't exist, imagining that the rights of the people come from THEM. But the truth is that they do exist. Homesteading is one such right. By mixing one's labor with the land, whether it is rolling plain, or an asteroid, one gains ownership of that land.

Governments have the guns though. But then, the space miners would have the asteroids, so I would guess that they would leave them be after the first asteroid made a near miss of the planet.

Your 'homesteading' right is ultimately defeated by an even more natural right: The right of he who has the sniper rifle to shoot you and your family from a safe distance, then come loot your home and take over your land.

Rights are an artificial construct, and exist only so long as they can be enforced either directly (Employ enough guards to secure your home against any threat) or indirectly (Have a government that will, reasonably reliably, either defend you or remove the economic incentive for attack by finding and imprisoning the attacker afterwards). A right that is not in some way backed up by physical force simply doesn't exist: You can whine all you want about your 'right' to property, but it won't do you one bit of good if there isn't ultimately the threat of violence to back it up.

In space violence isn't very practical, so property rights would be backed up by the threat of governmental seizure of the earthbound assets of offending companies or individuals... and again, you still need the men with guns sitting around somewhere just in case a CEO converts all company product to gold and tries to hide it in an abandoned mine. Not that any of them would be that stupid, because they know that if they defy a court ruling long enough sooner or later violence will happen.

You are an idiot. Homesteading has existed for all of history. One guy with a sniper rifle can't take away someone else's land because everyone recognizes the rights of the homesteader, while very few recognize the rights of the thief. The thief/murderer will be killed for his crimes, whether by police in a state, or by aggrieved relatives in an anarchic state.

You shouldn't talk about things you have no background in. Rights are no more artificial than society. They both exist, even if pigheaded fools like yourself claim they don't.

I don't know whom it was written by, or whether it even says what you claim it says, but the notion that "North American Indians were sedentary farmers" is plainly wrong. Yes, they didn't have horses before Europeans arrived, which is why they used sled dogs instead. They most certainly never had the notion of individual land ownership, either - it was all collectively owned by the tribe. Pretty much no known culture at this level of development groks private ownership on land - this pattern was repeated ag

'natural rights' are meaningless. Rights only exist in so far as something strong enough can stop people from violating them. Take away that state force and it just comes down to people having the resources to stop others.. in other words, become states.

'Homesteading' has nothing natural to it.. it was a piece of paper from the government saying that they would let you go settle in someone else's territory, and if those people got uppity you had the backing of the military.

Natural rights is an interesting topic, indeed. However, if there is ever a right that is entirely artificial, then it is property. The labor mixing argument has largerly fallen out of serious consideration in philosophical circles these days, being subject to way too many intrinsic problems.

Like, if I make a a glass of juice and pour it into the ocean, does that make the ocean mine, or did I just waste it?

Once you start looking at the enormous variety of property claims that exist, then you realize that pr

There are currently no governments with the ability to enforce their laws in space. Therefor if you can get to it in space and defend it from those who want to take it from you, it's yours. Of course, if you want to sell some of it back on earth, you will need to get governments to agree to let you sell it (unless of course you smuggle it in, but that is yet an additional expense).

Property rights in space will likely be determined by who gets there first, and who can muscle away the competition, either by military or political means.

Personally, I'm terribly excited about the upcoming prospects for things like asteroid mining and permanent settled colonies on the Moon and Mars (as a couple good early candidates). It looks like we are on the cusp of an explosion in private commercial space flight, exploration, and development. And with China getting into the game, we may have another space race.

There are asteroid-mining proposals backed by Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, various moon-mining proposals, and, announced just this month, a proposed moon-tourism venture.

Just shows that Reaganomics got it part right -- if you keep giving more and more money to a smaller and smaller sliver of society, they will find things to spend it on. Unfortunately, not cost efficient things that trickle down to smaller businesses, entrepreneurs, and working people. They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.

Someone has to build the space ship. Is the rich guy gonna do that?Someone has to design it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?Someone has to fly it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?Someone has to maintain it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?Someone has to launch it. Is the rich guy gonna do that?

Velocity of money [wikipedia.org] does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")

Most of the time people work because they need money to pay for the requirements of basic survival, things like food, rent and hopefully afford a few extra western luxuries.

Rich guy comes along, he is no longer motivated by the requirements of ensuring basic survival, and could become a professional layabout if he so wished (the idle rich don't get as much publicity). But instead he says, I have a bat shit crazy idea, lets build a moon rocket. Not only that, I'll flow enough money towards the project that f

They spend it on ever more gigantic toys. "Oooh, Larry, let's build a billion dollar spaceship!" Great. Too bad we don't have a thousand small businesses spending that money on labor, rent, stock, and taxes instead.

Unless they can wave a magic wand and have the spaceship assemble itself out of the dollar bills that they keep in their swimming pool, it would be pretty hard to keep the money from spreading out everywhere. I'm pretty sure that the billions they spend on the rocket go to all sorts of useful things such as workers to build the rocket, the space to build it in, the engineering firms to design it, the small companies that make crazy one-off things that really only have use in a rocket (don't underestimate h

Velocity of money [wikipedia.org] does not change significantly based on who is spending it. Every transaction has subsequent transactions that support the economy, and they cancel out. The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")

The question is the efficiency of the transaction under consideration. Does that spaceship, a giant chunk of capital, a great heaping pile of allocated GDP, produce wealth as quickly as a thousand small businesses? (please be rigorous in your consideration of the definition of "produce wealth")

Firstly, good on you for clarifying that (seriously, more discussions need to be that way).

Secondly, the efficiency of the transaction is going to be an extremely complex analysis, especially as you'll have analyze the 1000 small businesses that it's to be compared against (what kind of businesses? how saturated is their market? how interested are the business owners in their business?)

Speaking from my experience working R&D in a company that builds things that no one else has ever built before, I know

The economy grew, faster and bigger than it did before and after his termThe poverty level and the population in it shrunk.The avg family income grew.

"Interest rates, inflation, and unemployment fell faster under Reagan than they did immediately before or after his presidency. The only economic variable that was worse in the Reagan period than in both the pre- and post-Reagan years was the savings rate, which fell rapidly in the 1980s."

I know it's been said a dozen times in response to you, but you described exactly what is necessary for trickle-down to work. If the rich guys are spending money, then that money is circulating and doing our economy good. If the rich guys are sitting on a pile of cash in the bank and not spending it (or investing, or anything else to keep it moving) then that is when it actually hurts the economy. Having them spend metric buttloads of cash on crazy inventions is not only good for the economy and the lowe

I know it's been said a dozen times in response to you, but you described exactly what is necessary for trickle-down to work. If the rich guys are spending money, then that money is circulating and doing our economy good. If the rich guys are sitting on a pile of cash in the bank and not spending it (or investing, or anything else to keep it moving) then that is when it actually hurts the economy. Having them spend metric buttloads of cash on crazy inventions is not only good for the economy and the lower-class folks in it, but it's also good for society because, heaven forbid, they might actually discover something useful -- even if it's not quite what they were trying to do.

If the government is spending money, then that money is circulating and doing our economy good. If the government is sitting on a pile of cash in the bank and not spending it (or investing, or anything else to keep it moving) then that is when it actually hurts the economy. Having it spend metric buttloads of cash on crazy inventions is not only good for the economy and the lower-class folks in it, but it's also good for society because, heaven forbid, the government might actually discover something useful

Yea, we should definitely take that money away from people who want to build spaceships and further the entire human existence, and give it to small business owners selling beanie babies on eBay, new fad get skinny quick schemes, and plastic disposable toys retailers./me slaps you with a fish

They weren't "given" money. They organized land, labor and capital in such a way as to create wealth for themselves, their partners/investors, employees and customers that would not otherwise have existed.

That's only perfeclty true if the system is perfectly efficient. If the system is biased against the wealthy, they get paid less than they earn. If it is biased in their favor, they get paid more than they earn. Both cases, interestingly, have occurred in the US within the past 70 years. Check the IRS SOI [irs.gov]

You overestimate what we humans can achieve in comparison of the sheer scale of cosmic objects.

If an asteroid is big enough to be a threat to Earth, it's too massive to move. And the moon is 400000km from the Earth. Taking dirt from the inside and throwing it on the surface will not change its gravitational pull one iota.

...why mess with a body that so affects our world? Umm, look around -- we've been messing with our own planet pretty seriously for a century or so now. Anything we do to the Moon will have minor-to-none effects on the Earth for long enough that by the time there is any noticeable impact to the Earth it won't be a problem for us.

As for accidentally putting an asteroid into the Earth, we understand calculation of trajectories well enough to prevent that sort of thing.

I agree that we need to study how mining the moon, might affect the Earth in both the short term and long term.

Whether you believe in the global warming or the causes thereof, I wish they would have had the technology to study it 100 years ago. It's time to stop being stupid before we do things. And I don't want asteroids put in Earth orbit. If one co

A property right without a sovereign to back it up with arms if necessary leaves me at the mercy of anyone bigger than me who wants to take my claim away.

A property right with a sovereign to enforce it with arms if necessary may put that sovereign in violation of treaties it has already agreed to.

Even if it doesn't, such a sovereign would have to be willing to stand up against the combined military might countries who are willing to go to war to defend the "right of all mankind" to "own" the asteroid or whatever piece of property is at issue.

In other words, any country which says it will back a claim to "space real estate" is betting that the rest of the world won't care or at worst, will just whine about it but take no real action. Any person or company making such a claim is betting the same AND betting no other person or company will attempt to fight the claim by force.

Nobody CAN enforce it, which makes the whole discussion academic at best. Until we have technology sufficient to create a property conflict in space, it's all just talk. The ultimate issue will be decided the same way colonial boundaries were decided in centuries past: you get as much land as you can win a war on.

I don't think ownership of celestial bodies is necessary to conduct business on them. We shouldn't write laws concerning the future, because we simply have no idea what space enterpreneurship will be like. Once we have reached a level where getting profit from outer space becomes possible, we can create our laws while having much more information available. TFA's claims that private space projects are limited by legal problems is bullshit, ambitious space activities are limited by financial and technological problems, not legal ones.

No problem. When you get to your asteroid or whatever, you just declare yourself an independent space faring nation. You certainly have far more claim to that title than those who didn't get there. And you'll want to do that anyway, otherwise all of your profits will be taxed by the earthworms who think they are entitled to most of your profits and to tell you how to do things, even though they took mo risk and provided no service to you.

Property is something that can only exist within a given jurisdiction.Until a government claims jurisdiction over space, any one can go to space, establish a settlement and claim sovereignty and ownership.

Any attempt by a government to claim you're on their land would then be an act of war.

But that's very unlikely in the foreseeable future. What will happen is that private entities will make visits or send machinery to the spot. So if somebody else has rights to that place, they can prosecute on Earth.

A long time ago people ventured out to discover new land with the intention of CLAIMING said land.

Once claimed (for the country, usually) the land could be developed under the laws of said country.

While I understand and agree with the proposition that it'd be unfair (or at least, unreasonable) for any country to claim an entire planet (at least, any planet in this system) but Asteroids and Various Other Miscellaneous Bodies should quite literally be UP FOR GRABS.

It basically boils down to what nation/institution is powerful enough to control the space property and whatever rules they impose on it.

It could be one powerful country that takes space exploration on its own. We could a bit more cordial and share the costs of exploration via some kind of international agency and then auction of any property rights.

We could even parallel something like the Antarctic Treaty which basically ban military activity on the c

I think this is pretty much going to be a first come first serve kind of thing. I don't think anybody on earth should have the ability to declare property rights on something in space, unless they can walk right up to it and stick a flag in it (and, of course, the means to protect the flag). You can sit on earth and pay to have a bunch of lawyers claim rights on some space rock, but if someone else lands their spaceship on it you just look like a moron.

That is you enslaving men even as they venture out into the stars. "Dont go too far bold adventurer, you owe us and we shall be paid, no matter how far afield you wander."

I think there need to be a distinction between going there yourself and sending a robot to do it. Any person who is prepared to leave Earth and settle on an uninhabited celestial body can reasonably claim ownership of the area in which he settles. But if you build a robot to go and mine resources, and perhaps use some of those resources to

What id you and a number of people wish to mine an asteroid, use the materials to create a new space station, and live independantly and separately from the nations of earth?

You do realize that this, assuming we are not wiped out before it happens, is the natural progression. Those of us who are unhappy with existing arrangements and affairs are going to want to leave. In fact, this may be the first time in history where such migrations have been nearly entirely infeasible. That will not last forever....and

If private entities get out there then that is probably what will determine who owns what. However, if they still have terrestrial assets like bank accounts or buy supplies then they will still be subject to what the nations they get those from say.

Didn't Columbus claim the Americas in the name of Spain when he planted a flag?

Yes. From his letter describing his voyage, "...where I found very many islands peopled with inhabitants beyond number. And of them all I have taken possession for their Highnesses with proclamation and the royal standard displayed and I was not gainsaid..."

Did we not do the same when we planted a flag on the moon?

Armstrong didn't make any such proclamation when he planted the US flag on the Moon, and I don't believe any of the

Small problem. When the US planted the flag, it was to memorialize the event, not to claim the moon for anyone. The plaque with the flag says "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Likely part of the reason that the Nixon ordered the US flag (vs the UN flag or both) planted was that he caved to congressional pressure. At the time, a rider attached to the house appropriations bill for space funding would have required the US flag